How does a beautiful idea begin? When does that idea become art? Eyelids, a short film shown this year at Cannes and the Chicago International Film Festival, began in 2007 as a doodle on a post-it note. Brad Bischoff, a student at Columbia College and the co-founder of the production company, Look at Rubbish, first envisioned Eyelids as a Valentine's Day poem for his girlfriend. As friends from Look at Rubbish got involved, the project grew to include a children’s book and eventually the short film. The result of this collaborative process is a touching story narrated by Bischoff’s grandfather and filmed on black and white 16mm film.

This video was almost impossible for me to deal with, since I have two boys of my own. Unlike some of the comment-leavers below the video on YouTube, I saw the ending coming a mile away. This video feels like watching a car accident develop right in front of my eyes.

I would never allow one of my sons to live on one side of that screen so that the other could blissfully exist on the other. But as I tied my son’s shoes this morning and sent him off to daycare, I couldn’t help but wonder where the hands were that made his sneakers. Whose son made those little blue tennis shoes? Where did he sleep last night? When he woke up, did he have a glass of milk to drink? While my son plays with toys all day (possibly made by some other boy), would he get to play at all?

Once upon a time while in college, I found myself on an elevator when the cable broke.  It may have had something to do with 23 guys cramming into a cart that had a maximum capacity of 11.  The cable snapped.  We fell 4 stories.  A "safety" cable caught us 2 feet before we hit the bottom.  (I love safety cables.)  After celebrating the fact that we were all still alive, we waited a memorable 25 minutes before the fire department was able to pull us out of the elevator. 

In October of 1999, Nicholas White had a not-so-similar encounter with an elevator.  While working late in a downtown high rise in New York City, White decided to go out for a cigarette break.   Upon the elevator ride back to his office, his life would be forever impacted as a malfunction in the elevator would leave him trapped for... well, a bit more than 25 minutes.

What happens when a few have so much and so many have so little?  A pillow fight.  

As our world gets smaller, via new technologies (i.e. the internet, video technologies, cell phone capabilities, etc.) we begin to get a clearer view of how the "things" in our world are distributed.  In America we created a middle class (which is a historically significant social step) and began thinking all things were fairly evenly distributed.  Then Bono started blabbing about some country called "Africa" (later research revealed "Africa" to actually be a continent, consisting of many, very diverse countries) and we had a harder time feeling secure in how things in our world were distributed among the people of our world.